> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.
>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.
You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.
As a long time DDG user, Google Search is better. I end up searching again on Google about half of the time I search for technical stuff (software) or for non English sites. I just feel DDG didn't understand what I want and Google usually does. I don't login on Google and use a Firefox extension to clear the cookies so Google might only rely on the search term, not my history, but who knows.
Google's ads do not seem particularly well targeted, even with the 20+ years of information they have collected on me. I feel like I've given up way, way too much of my privacy for what I've been given in return.
By far, the best targeting is to show an ad as I explicitly search for something and that's not going to go away for them anytime soon.
> which is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users
You talk like that’s the only way. Instead of fitting the ad to users, we could fit the ad to the content, like we’ve always done. Tracking users isn’t necessary.
> is only effective with good targeting to the fitting users
This isn't true in my experience. When I was an affiliate marketer in a past life, it was extremely profitable to promote health and fitness products on generic search terms such as "basketball" and "football scores". User demographic data wasn't required.
Unfortunately, Google decided that they don't like affiliate marketers.
Of course we'll never know how much of a difference targeting makes to the bottom line, but I doubt that it's huge.
Google's revenue comes from people searching for queries like "good traffic ticket lawyer", and from competitors bidding up each others' brand names. It would probably work just fine without targeting.
VisiCalc was conceived in 1978, before the internet and all the data that comes with it. Excel has had to catch up with these developments and is finally doing a good job with it.
This is a great idea but the list seems incomplete. For example, where are the email marketing tools? Mailchimp / Intuit, Convetkit, SendFox, and so many more. There are many other markets / verticals not covered here.
> Excel may be the most influential software ever built.
I believe this to be true in business. Other tech may be more widely used eg “email” but the software is created by a variety of different companies (Google, Microsoft).
I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.
One use case where this does not work: when attempting to learn if someone understood you properly. I find myself asking short, direct questions, often in a managerial capacity, to confirm that other people have the correct understanding. Making a statement and then asking an individual “do you understand?” does not suffice to confirm if someone has the correct understanding.
I feel like a more appropriate name would be “write first, then build”. “Documentation” reminds the product managers and engineers of corporate-y documents like release notes. The “documentation” described is more of a fluid collection of ideas than what we would consider “documentation”. I have found this to be true - “Writing is a way of finding out”.
